Reliability is seldom given its due in art. The idea of the bloody-minded maverick is deeply rooted, particularly in the creative thickets abutting the mainstream. (Blame Bob Dylan.) Creativity, in this discourse, is all about risk-taking; switching it up.
Spare a thought, then, for Beach House, Baltimore purveyors of gauzy and somnambulant pop. The duo have been astonishingly consistent in pursuit of one sound throughout a decade and five albums, growing a fanbase, probably turning up to things on time. These are not bloody-minded mavericks, but diligent refiners.
Perhaps Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand played louder on their last album, 2012’s Bloom, recalling the period where minimalists Low stopped being muted and stepped on the effects pedals. But Beach House remain wedded to a sound like a sun-faded abstract expressionist painting: one or two hues, shading into many more if you stare at it for long enough, the floaters adding to the effect. Legrand’s keyboards are permanently set to “organ wash”, Scally’s guitar to “bejewelled”; Legrand’s often multitracked vocals float atop mid-paced prismatic glides. If you are not in the mood, it can all turn into non-specific pastels. If you’re in need of succour, Beach House do a convincing line in sunshine during rain.
This album – Depression Cherry – bears no obvious relationship to the accursed condition; it is particularly blithe and full of equanimity about life’s unrelenting forward motion (perhaps that’s the relationship). Having aesthetically objected to accommodating live drums with increased volumes, Legrand and Scally have quietened down and returned to the very basic machine patterns of their earliest records, enhancing the vintage feel of the keyboards. There is the very faintest, almost homeopathic, impression of 80s rock (or at least, the 80s rock recalled by the War On Drugs) on interludes such as Wildflower. The album standout is 10:37, which feels starker than Beach House’s usual saturated thrum, with layered and chopped-up backing vocals that gently suggest Brian Wilson and R&B.
Where their search for source material used to start and end in the early 90s, with what the Americans called “dreampop” and the sarcastic British music press dubbed “shoegaze”, there is a move to travel further back in time. The lovely PPP, a waltz, harks back to the girl group era for its spoken-word vocal (and, alarmingly, Coldplay’s Clocks for its opening piano notes); the album closer, Days of Candy, starts as a chorale.
These are simpatico tweaks to the formula; nothing radical. The early 90s remain represented – Sparks carries the sense-impression of My Bloody Valentine’s Bilinda Butcher – but by now, Beach House have started sounding like Beach House rather than the sum of their influences. So if Depression Cherry sounds as though they are stuck in a groove, well, they are. But it is a groove worth wallowing in.
